Another year of Missouri Hope in the Books

Another successful three days of moulage at Missouri Hope.

I haven't written because I was really busy! I had a crew of three volunteers and my husband, and we managed to moulage about 150 people to go out into the field to play victims of a major tornado. 

Here's a couple examples:

I didn't get a lot of pictures because I was too busy moulaging.

As you can imagine, we were pretty busy with all of those people to moulage, but I can credit my team with making it a pretty painless experience. Usually we're several people behind by the time it's time to place them into the scenario, but we consistently finished on time. 

It's great closing on another successful year! And I'm SO tired!

Missouri Hope has come.

Missouri Hope has come upon us, and I'm not sure I'm ready for it.

For those of you new to the blog, Missouri Hope is an annual disaster simulation held at a park near here. Participants range from emergency and disaster management students to area police and emergency personnel. Missouri Hope is huge for a disaster management exercise.

There will be, over Friday through Sunday, approximately 240 volunteers, who will serve as our "victims" for the exercise. And I, with a small team of moulagers, will turn these people into victims using makeup. 

That's a lot of people.

Today's the day I do last-minute shopping (for face wipes and eyeliner pens), do a little inventory, and try to prepare myself for the frantic rush of doing all this makeup. 

Wish me luck.

A bloody good time

I don't have a lot of time to put in a big post, because I will be moulaging a bunch of high schoolers for the high school docudrama. This means that I look at a card detailing injuries and recreate it on a volunteer using makeup.

The docudrama exists as a way to scare teens out of drunk driving, distracted driving, and various other jerky things teens do while driving that will get them and others killed. The woman who runs it encourages us to get severe and bloody with our casualty simulation because they will be seeing it from a distance (unlike Missouri Hope, where people will see it close up). 

It's a fun time. 

ENDEX (as they say at the end of a preparedness training exercise)

Another New York Hope in the books; I think the numbers go like this:

Three moulage artists

Ninety distinct moulage applications

Scenarios: Urban search and rescue, rural search and rescue, wilderness search and rescue, cityscape active shooter, swiftwater rescue

Injuries ranging from pneumothorax to head injuries minor and deadly, to impalements, open fractures, burns, intestinal evisceration, scrapes and bruises, and throw in a couple heart attacks and mentally disturbed roles.

Staff members -- a surprising number I haven't counted, but categories are coordinating staff, logistics, lane CEs (who run the scenarios), team CEs (who manage the student teams), safety staff, transportation and moulage. 
******

I slept for 12 hours last night. I'm hoping to get some brain cells free to write today as I wait for the train back home -- and on the train back home, as I'll have a lot of free time. 

Right back to first day of classes.

Let me know, though, if you want to see more moulage pics.

Day 2 moulage

Day 2 of moulage: I'm already tired, and I'll be here till at least 9 PM.

This is such a great opportunity, though, because we're under the supervision of Will Lanfear, who does moulage for a living (ok, among other things). We talk shop, and I learn all sorts of new things to try out at home. 

The Hope exercises, of which there are currently three (Missouri, Florida, and New York), were created to train college students in emergency and disaster management majors to use their skills in as realistic learning environment as possible. The exercises aim for the optimal amount of stress for learning -- too little, and it comes off as frivolous; too much and the learner shuts down. Now others take an opportunity to train, especially at Missouri Hope, where we have nurses, emergency personnel, and the National Guard both creating the learning opportunities and learning themselves.

This is where moulage comes in -- we exist to make the disaster scenarios as realistic as possible. You saw a couple of our pieces yesterday. Moulage is 3/4 knowing your materials -- skin and bone wax (theatrical products), gel blood and paste blood (not really blood, but theatrical products again), gelatin, latex, and greasepaint; and 1/4 looking at gory pictures and saying "I want to learn to do that!"

So that's what I do, and that's how I'm spending my last week of freedom before the fall semester starts.

Moulage!

If you're wondering what I'm up to ...

Add caption

Pretty bad bone break, eh?

Just bruises and scrapes.


All while my colleagues back at Northwest Missouri State University are in meetings....

Time to Go

I'm heading out today for my moulage stint at New York Hope, housed at the New York State Preparedness Training Center, otherwise known as Disaster Disneyland. This is a wonderful opportunity to take a working vacation, as my husband and I take the train (California Zephyr; Lake Shore Limited) and get a sleeper car.

I will try to post on the trip, at least a little. Maybe some photographs. You've been on this trip with me before.

Summer's End

My summer's winding down. This might be the reason I feel so lazy right now, knowing that in less than a month I will be back to work. 

I work as an associate professor at Northwest Missouri State University. I don't know how professors are regarded in Europe (where some of my more regular readers reside), but in the US they're widely regarded as suspicious characters who subject their students to arcane knowledge such as how to think critically and use unbiased data to draw conclusions from. 

I have one last hurrah before I go back to work (which has the added bonus of keeping me out of beginning of semester meetings) -- my annual gig at New York Hope moulaging. This also includes train travel with a sleeper car and hanging out to write in the Metropolitan Lounge in Chicago's Union Station (waiting for my connector train). 

But I have a couple weeks before then, working on classes before the semester starts and writing (I need motivation!) and resting before things get crazy.

Recovery

"Here, this won't hurt a bit."

This is my favorite picture from Missouri Hope's moulage headquarters. Here I'm demonstrating various techniques on one of our moulage artists who was kind enough to let me bruise and cut her up pretty badly.

I estimated from yesterday's stats -- 180 roleplayers in three shifts, 4-6 moulage artists per shift -- that boils down to 7-10 roleplayer moulages per person per hour.

I haven't totally recovered yet. I feel like I have jet lag although I haven't gone anywhere -- except to the mythical country of Atlantica, torn by tensions between north and south, crippled by an earthquake and its aftermath. A country I helped create.

Life will be back to normal, back to writing, in a day or so, when I find my feet on firm ground and arrive home again.

Another year of Missouri Hope in the books.

Role players: 185

Amateur moulage artists: 6

Scenarios: Earthquake, car bomb, refugee camp, water rescue, beatings by marauding gangs.
Injuries: impalements, burns, disembowelments, cuts, scrapes, plucked out eye, bruises, lacerations, broken bones, drowning, cholera, old injuries badly treated.

Real world emergencies at the moulage headquarters: 0

I'd say we had a successful Missouri Hope at the moulage building.

Moulage mode

I can't talk about writing today, because my brain is completely into Moulage Mode.

I walk around the house looking for random objects that look like they'd make good impalements.

I have a gallon and a half of fresh fake blood by the basement door and I wonder if it's enough.

I have gone through two and a half pounds of powdered plain gelatin and I wish I had more.

I was told to prepare for lots of impalements. I have prepared 28 impalement prosthetics thus far.

Unflavored gelatin smells like burnt hair. My house smells like burnt hair.

I am dreaming third-degree burns.

I love this.


I'll write when I get time. It's going to be an intense couple of days moulaging for the biggest exercise that Consortium for Humanitarian Service in Education holds.

The Art of Gorifying

Last night, I made shrapnel. Lots of shrapnel.

Missouri Hope is this weekend, and all my creative brain cells are occupied in making prosthetic plant-ons for casualty simulation. These are used to simulate impalements, and can be glued on someone's skin with spirit gum. I learned this from Will Lanfear, who is a professional moulage artist in New York state.

I made a quart of special effects gelatin -- 2 cups each of water and unflavored gelatin, 1/4 cup each of sorbitol and glycerin. It's actually fun and soothing to make, and it can be frozen.

The loops of intestines are ready, and all they need are fake blood  (1 jug liquid starch, 1/4 cup red food coloring, 1 teaspoon blue food coloring).

Yes, moulage (casualty simulation) is gory. It's a lot of sitting around the dinner table talking about the color of day-old bruises and how laminating plastic makes good glass debris. It's googling pictures of hand deglovings (this is exactly what it sounds like) and third-degree burns, and then figuring out how to recreate those injuries. It's buying a large wheeled toolkit to bring supplies in to the site.

It's being nicknamed "The Queen of Gore" by a retired Army brigadier general.

Yes, it's creativity.

My weekend

Since Thursday, I have been in Oriskany (O-RIS-can-knee) New York, at the New York State Preparedness Training Center, doing moulage on willing victims for training purposes.

I'm in my usual post-event daze, made more intense by working under a professional moulage artist with twenty years experience. I learned how to make my injuries even better, how to work with plaster molds, latex and gelatin to make convincing wounds, and how to get wax wounds to stick (I work mostly in wax).

Hope exercises (Missouri Hope, New York Hope, Atlantic Hope and the new ones coming down the pike) are intense. The participants are assigned to teams, and the teams work to solve problems in search and rescue, triage and first aid, and incident command. They are placed in realistic scenarios and have to solve them on the spot. Complications thrown into the scenarios make the participants think on their feet.

There are at least as many staff members as participants -- team controller/evaluators, who advise the participant teams, lane controller/evaluators, who run the scenario lanes, logistics personnel, subject matter experts, exercise director and staff, roleplayers --

And the moulage staff, who are looked at with a certain awe.


I'm bone-tired. It's been an intense couple of days, which I wouldn't trade for anything, because they've given me the opportunity to improve. I'm not sure if I'm making any sense here; I hope so. Thanks for reading.

Moulage day

He looked better before I beat him up.

This is what I came to do. This is moulage.

Second and third degree burns are done with unflavored gelatin and grease paints.

This is the most unalloyed creativity I get to do in my life. No worries about whether I’m doing well enough, whether anyone notices my work, whether I’m accomplishing anything — people tell me that me and my crew are freaking out everyone out there.

I’m an insecure person at times. I can ignore it when I try to get a novel published because I’m so excited about the creative process. But when the rejections come in, I wonder what I’m doing trying to get published in the first place.

With moulage, I will never be renowned. I will never work in Hollywood. I’m good enough and cheap enough (free) that people will need me to do the stuff I do. I have lost this in writing, where I keep saying “If I were good, I’d get an agent/get on Amazon Scout’s hot list/get published” because people CARE about successful authors.

In other words, moulage is a return to my childhood (in which I was a lot like Marcie). Writing has become the struggle of being heard as an adult.

Welcome to the Hotel Atlantica. Cots optional.

Another day in Atlantica. We had our first round of beans and rice, supplemented by Cuban pork to weep for, with crackling skin and deep flavor. We will likely eat beans and rice without it tonight. Remember us as you drink your coffee — It’s 6 AM and there’s no coffee to be seen. And we have no way to get out of Atlantica.

No, Atlantic Hope is still some of the most fun I have all year. The people who volunteer to run the show are emergency personnel from various ares — one Brigadier General, a retired Navy Seal, nurses, humanitarian aid workers, firefighters, security personnel — and me, a pacifist who feels uneasy when people talk about their weapons like beloved racehorses. But they need us, because they don’t think they have the talent to do casualty simulation or, perhaps think it’s not as important as what they do. It is, after all, makeup, which is girly stuff.

I don’t really know if I have as much talent as they think I do. Richard and I get geeeted regularly during the exercise with “Really love your work!” We’re self-taught. Richard studied under me. I,d love to get more training but most of it is driven by the various companies who make Moulage products. We are not makeup artists.

But I’m here, and they need me, and when I’m in the flow of creativity, none of the above matters. I’m here doing something I love.

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Twenty-seven days left, and it already looks bleak for my campaign. Thank you if you’ve nominated me; 357 nominations is more than I thought, and less than I need. It seems a brutal way of getting discovered, though, and I know I may not be writing what people want to read, but thank you. https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/250Q7OJ0R0F8W

Welcome to Atlantica

I’m typing this from the borders of Atlantica, the imaginary country
People from the Consortium for Humanitarian Service and Education will be creating for the training of some 50 individuals.

Atlantica is a troubled country. Freshly out of a war with a neighboring nation, Atlantica is riddled with corrupt officials, suspicious factions, and cholera. Then Atlantica gets hit by an earthquake, and our humanitarian aid teams navigate the red tape, vague threats from officials, and diseases rampant in the area to negotiate aid for the fragile country.

The idea behind CHSE’s exercises is to create a realistic exercise so that the participants can learn under pressure, make mistakes, and get advice from controller-evaluators so they can retry the encounter.

My job is to create realism. I’m the coordinator of the Moulage crew, and my crew supplies realism through simulated injuries and illnesses. We go for as much medical realism as we can produce with stage makeup and fake blood. None of our trainees have vomited yet, but we once sent someone to a hospital for a drill and he was seconds away from getting an IV.

Moulage is one of my favorite creative outlets. My husband and I have a little competition as to who’s grossing out people the most realistically. His specialty is degloving injuries, mine is deep burns. We learn from the nurses, medics, and zombie aficionados we encounter on our crews. And it’s worth sleeping on the floor and eating the Atlantican national dish, rice and beans, for four days.

I wish you could be here in sunny Atlantica.

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Just a reminder that my Kindle Scout campaign is live. If you want to nominate the book, go through the whole nomination process:

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/250Q7OJ0R0F8W

Another (Moulage) Gig in my Future

When I talk about "gigs", I'm not talking about music (I play Irish bodhran, but not well), comedy (my comedy career is restricted to teaching), or acting (my theatre career began and ended in high school). I'm talking about my other creative outlet, moulage.

Moulage is, as I may have said before, casualty simulation -- or as I like to say it, gorifying people. Injuries are rendered by a combination of theatre makeup materials, homemade makeup, props, fake glass, sticks and pipes for impalements, and lots of skill and imagination.

This is done for the benefit of training community emergency response team (CERT) members, first responders, nurses, and humanitarian aid workers. I also provide my skills to high school safety docudramas, active shooter training, and creating zombies (although I'm not nearly as good at the latter as is my friend Rod Zirkle.)

I am entirely self-taught. I was recruited for moulage crew as an assistant in Missouri Hope (one of the CHSE exercises below) in 2013. I dithered around a lot, and the next year I was recruited as the moulage coordinator for Missouri Hope. With absolutely no real training, I studied injury pictures and makeup and that DVD from Simulaids where they practice all the techniques on a straight-faced student.

This gig is a big one -- a major humanitarian service training program in Florida. You can learn a little about Atlantic Hope and the Consortium for Humanitarian Service and Education (CHSE) here.  I will spend three days sleeping on the floor, eating beans and rice and bad coffee, and modeling burns for free (but I love it!) I will be trying to report from the field Wednesday-Monday.

Here's an example of my work from last year's Atlantic Hope:

Building up a burn. 

Finished product. Beneath the skin, we're all pinkish. This is not meant to be a profound statement.

I'm a perfectionist. If I had to do this again, I would not put the black at the outside, because it doesn't look like soot, but third-degree burn (which it isn't if it's at the outer edge. I would slather it in thick gelatin around the edges and over the pink parts to give it a more three-dimensional look and maybe build up some blisters with gelatin. 

I'll be honest -- I think I keep getting gigs because nobody's found anyone else locally who claims to do moulage. I think I have about six gigs a year. Let's see: Missouri Hope, New York Hope, Atlantic Hope, CERT training in the spring, the prison simulation and night training for the Emergency and Disaster Management students, and the high school docudrama. I guess that's seven. I sometimes also do moulage for the Emergency Medical Responder testing, nurses' training, and the active shooter training on campus.

It's a lot of fun and I feel appreciated when I do this. I lead a crew of about 4-6 people (including my husband), I create better and better works through learning and studying moulage, and my time goes toward the greater good. It's a largely anonymous job -- you'll never see pictures of me in any of the CHSE promotionals, and I'm subsumed as a member of the "moulage crew". But when people compliment the moulage, I know that I've contributed my skills in moulage and teaching to the rest of the crew.

Cross-training in creativity

I have been quiet lately, as I've warned, because I've just finished one of the most rewarding events of my year: Missouri Hope, the major Emergency and Disaster Management training where I live. As I've said before, I'm the moulage coordinator, which means I supervise a half-dozen people in making our roleplayers look suitably injured. I also moulage, usually the most complex injuries -- although this year, my crew did me proud by simulating impalements, open fractures, and eviscerations on their own.

I’ve been thinking about cross-training. Cross-training is the practice of incorporating physical exercise in areas other than one’s primary sport or exercise regimen. It’s incorporating cardio with weightlifting or walking with running. Without cross-training, one set of muscles can overdevelop while another set weakens, destroying stride, balance, and strength.

Do writers need to cross-train? I think so, especially when suffering from writers' block. There are many creative arts, some soothing, some complex, some simple. I would suggest activities that have a little bit of challenge so as not to be boring, while providing a sense of mastery, because these activities add an important quality to your life -- that of flow, a type of active meditation.

I don't want to put journaling in here, because that exercises the same muscles. But how about knitting or crocheting, fingerpainting, sketching, sidewalk chalking, dancing, karate, crafts, mask-making, improv, or -- or moulage? :)

Short post -- Moulage and External Validation

I may not be writing as much this week, because this is my big week for performing moulage. If I haven't mentioned it, moulage is casualty simulation for emergency workers. This week I do two events -- a small one this morning where I help out with the high school's annual docudrama where they hammer home the consequences of drinking/texting while driving. Richard and I will moulage seven high schoolers.

This Friday-Sunday is the big event, Missouri Hope. The biggest of the Hope exercises held by Consortium for Humanitarian Service and Education, we will moulage about 200 people by the time we're done. I will have a bigger crew, perhaps 8 per day, and I will provide hands-on training while we create victims -- all simulated injuries of course -- of a major tornado so that emergency personnel and students can use their skills in a realistic scenario.

I have developed a reputation for this among the CHSE exercises, which makes me happy. I know I can do better, and I always try to do better. In that way, it's like writing, but I feel more secure about it because I have external validation. And external validation is one of the biggest motivators there is.

My colleagues call me the Queen of Gore. What better external validation is that?

Learn Everything

Everything a writer learns will help their writing.

First example: after twenty-something years of teaching college students, I've learned that classes get categorized in three groups: "I loved that class", "It was okay", and "Why did I have to take that class?" The number one class in the third category was Philosophy, otherwise known as "that class where you argue totally unimportant things".  I sympathized with these students because I'd taken philosophy myself.  I had discovered the purpose of philosophy was to come up with a internally coherent argument about unseen and unknown things. There's no way to objectively test if your argument is correct. (in the words of my mother, "What difference does it make if we have free will or not? We can't change it!")

When I took philosophy, I said what countless other students said -- "what am I going to use this for?" Years later, I started writing novels, which required different skills than short stories and poetry. Because I wrote fantasy, I had to build talents and powers and magic and the like that were internally consistent. (Trust me, Harry Potter fans have convinced me that every single discrepancy in magic will be noted by the readers -- Just look up "Elder Wand" and you'll get an earful.) The jump from internally consistent arguments to internally consistent magic systems wasn't that big. So now I finally get to use philosophy for something useful!

Another example: Moulage. According to my annual report last year, I am a nationally recognized moulage expert. (This means I've been moulage coordinator for two (going on three) of the disaster training exercises for the Consortium for Humanitarian Service and Education.) Moulage, by the way, is otherwise known as casualty simulation. Yes, that means I make ordinary people look like victims for emergency and disaster training. I taught myself how to do this after some lovely people mistook me for an expert, and I keep getting better as I go. But the reason I mention it here is because I have had to study many, many gory pictures to do my art -- closed abdominal injury, disembowelments, burns, open and closed fractures, gunshots ... If people get wounded or killed in my writing, I either know what the carnage looks like or I look it up.

In short, a writer can't say "I'll never use that", because that most arcane or useless bit of information can, and will, come in handy.
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If you've read this far: I will be taking the train out to upstate New York on Wednesday to serve as Moulage Coordinator for the third exercise in the CHSE series, New York Hope. I hope to have time to write, even on the train. I would post pictures of my handiwork, but it's ... gross.